Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris'

Time-travel and its inevitable companion, fiction-tourism, have long been staples of Woody Allen films. In Play It Again, Sam (1972), Humphrey Bogart's "Rick" character materializes out of Casablanca to advise Woody's protagonist about his love life. In Sleeper (1973), Allen awakens 200 years in the future to find himself in a totalitarian dictatorship whose government, he concludes, is "worse than California's." In The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), a lonely shop girl (Mia Farrow) escapes America's Depression by stepping into a glamorous Hollywood film, while the same film's hero breaks out of the screen to sample real life.

Of course Allen hardly owns a monopoly on such devices. In the 1947 Lerner-Loewe Broadway musical Brigadoon, a New York ad man on a hunting trip in Scotland stumbles upon a village that comes to life for just one day every century and promptly falls in love with a local girl, thereby forcing himself to choose between life in the hectic present or the bucolic past.

Pearl Harbor minus one

In Somewhere in Time (1980), Christopher Reeve falls in love with an old picture of Jane Seymour and travels back to 1912 to meet her. In The Final Countdown (1980), a modern U.S. aircraft carrier crosses a time warp and finds itself in the Pacific on the day before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, forcing the captain (Kirk Douglas) to decide whether to interfere with history.

And let us not forget everyone's favorite banal example of this genre, Field of Dreams (1989), in which Shoeless Joe Jackson and his scandal-plagued teammates from the 1919 Chicago White Sox emerge from purgatory to play baseball in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.

With a few notable exceptions— Brigadoon is surely one—these tales are usually far more interesting in concept than in execution. Sleeper is mostly a vehicle for Woody Allen wisecracks (in Allen's world of the future, men's clothing stores are run by Jewish robots, etc.). The appearance of the old ballplayers in Field of Dreams is almost as anticlimactic as the meeting between Reeve and Seymour in Somewhere in Time (he's supposed to be a playwright and she's an actress, but not a single intelligent word crosses their lips). And you won't be surprised to learn that Kirk Douglas decides not to interfere with history in The Final Countdown.

Rubbing elbows with Hemingway

In Midnight In Paris, Woody Allen's latest foray into this overused device, a would-be American novelist in Paris— his head cluttered with dreamy notions about the romantic charms of the City of Light— finds himself plunked into the city's alleged artistic apogee: the roaring '20s, when Paris played host to America's best and brightest expatriates. Each night the impressionable protagonist Gil finds himself rubbing elbows with the likes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Luis BuÓ±uel— the list of names dropped is endless.

As I said, it's a fascinating concept, pathetically executed. In Play It Again Sam, the fictitious Bogart appearances comprise a key element of the plot. But in Midnight in Paris, the story ends where it ought to begin: when the writer Gil Pender steps back into the '20s.

Here Gil finds that the great artists and writers of the past have nothing meaningful to tell him, and vice versa. Hemingway in private tells Gil nothing that he hasn't said in his novels. To be sure, Gertrude Stein reads Gil's manuscript and suggests, we are told, some useful improvements in his novel. But what are they? Why does she take an interest in Gil? How does this novel relate to Gil as a person? And why should we care about any of these characters, aside from the fact that their names are familiar?

Clueless about Paris

Yes, I know: Allen's point here is that nostalgia is overrated. In the midst of his goggle-eyed visit to the "'20s, Gil discovers that at least one of the luminaries he meets— Picasso's mistress Adriana— herself yearns to be back in the Paris of La Belle Epoque in the 1890s. But the fact remains: What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland also holds true for Woody Allen's lost Paris: There's no there there.

For all the lip service that Allen pays in this film to romantic Parisian atmosphere— not to mention an opening montage of bistros and boats along the Seine— he provides no real clue about the critical question his protagonist must confront: Why is it easier to fall in love in some places than in others— in Paris or Rome or San Francisco, say, as opposed to London or Berlin or Chicago? Indeed, much of Midnight in Paris takes place not on the streets of Paris but in the sterile five-star hotel where Gil, his American fiancée and her wealthy parents have holed up.

Midnight in Paris contains exactly one inspired moment: A private detective, hired by Gil's suspicious future father-in-law, takes a wrong turn while tailing Gil's post-midnight adventures and winds up in 17th-Century Versailles, being chased by guards while Louis XIV shouts, "Off with his head!"

Now, there's a useful insight: Most of us, if granted our most cherished nostalgic wish, would be dead within an hour of our arrival in the past. (As Gil himself observes of his 1920s pals, "These people don't have any antibiotics.")

A cyclist in old Mexico

For real insight on this subject, forget the phony affectations of Midnight in Paris and seek out instead an obscure 1982 film called Timerider. This utterly unpretentious B-movie concerns a self-absorbed motorcyclist who, while riding a cross-country race in Baja California, inadvertently crosses a time warp and finds himself in Mexico in 1877, where his rugged good looks and cycling skills are useless, especially after his bike conks out.

Clueless about history, the hero assumes that the Mexican village he has stumbled upon is a hippie commune; incapable of defending himself, he must turn for survival to a feisty young woman who takes pity on him (and turns out to be his great-grandmother). In its best moments, this decidedly minor film speaks volumes about the narrow perspectives of modern American heroes.

Jennie's timeless love

For my money, though, the gold standard of time-travel films remains Portrait of Jennie (1948). On a bench in Central Park, a struggling artist named Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) finds a small girl dressed in turn-of-the-20th-Century clothes. She has clearly sought him out from another age, but why? Over the months to follow, as this Jennie grows up more rapidly than is possible (into the beautiful Jennifer Jones), Eben falls in love with her and she with him.

Because Jennie has come out of the past, Eben is able to investigate her life and background, in the course of which he discovers that she is doomed. Ultimately he fails to protect Jennie from her fate, but he does immortalize her in a portrait invested with all his love for her— his first truly inspired work, and the only color image in an otherwise black-and-white film. That image will persist in my memory long after the superficial cutesiness of Midnight in Paris is forgotten.♦


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